Why Labour Can't Argue with the Left

Desperation. The word that, seen from afar, sums up Labour's campaign in Gorton and Denton. And the source of their fear is not the prospect of losing yet another seat to Reform, but conceding ground to the resurgent Greens. Having nixed Andy Burnham, the candidacies say everything about the two parties' respective trajectories. The Greens' Hannah Spencer, a plumber drawn to the party out of disgust with the political establishment. And Labour's Angeliki Stogia, a corporate lobbyist trudging a path into the parliamentary party beaten by so many others. Please tell me which is the pro-capitalist, petit bourgeois party and who is the organisation standing up for the working class in this by-election?

There have been two phases to Labour's campaign. It started with a studied failure to acknowledge the Green Party's existence. This is a fight between Labour and Reform, goes the party line, and progressive voters must get behind Angeliki to keep Reform out. The party even provided a Liberal Democrat-style bar chart putting the Greens in third place, which was hung from the property neighbouring Green campaign HQ. The problem, however, is that constituency polling - such as it is - have the Greens out in front and Labour in third. The betting markets, not that they have any special insight, also favour this outcome. Having decided pretending the Greens don't exist isn't working, they've moved on to gutter politics.

You might have thought that Reform's Matthew Goodwin, former pol prof and full-time far right grifter would have attracted Labour's ire. He's provided enough targets. He, after all, has called for a system of punitive taxation against women who do not have children. In Labour land, if it is between them and Reform then surely, surely their fiercest attacks should be turned toward the right. Instead, we get Keir Starmer calling the Green Party's public health-led approach to drugs "disgusting", and Sarah Jones, his policing minister, saying Zak Polanski wants to turn Britain's playgrounds "into crack dens". Brave considering the fondness several highly placed Labour figures have now or formerly had for the old nose powder. Labour's attitude is best summed up by Mike Tapp, the part-time home office minister and full-time clown from Dover and Deal. His vitriolic attack on the Greens stands out on his Twitter feed in sharp relief against a series of mild admonitions, at best, of Reform.

Writing in the New Statesman, John Elledge argues that Labour's hostility to the Greens, and bracketing them alongside Reform is only going to hurt Labour. What's left of their support knows there's no equivalence between the two parties. One party wants to welcome refugees, the other wants to deport Britons who don't meet their arbitrary criteria of national purity. One wants to help renters, the other wants to give landlords carte blanche to rinse tenants. You get the picture. And so do most Labour MPs, even those who performatively affect otherwise. They also know that the party's coalition has cracked and supporters are streaming to the Greens. It's not Reform that is Labour's biggest headache.

Which begs an interesting question. Labour's pandering to Reform and its attempt to outflank them from the right was and is justified by needing to win over Nigel Farage's fans. But this never applies in the opposite direction. Why doesn't Labour go harder on renters' rights, wages, workplaces, etc. to keep existing support on board? To my mind, there are two answers, both of which are baked into the party's politics. Firstly, according to the wisdom passed down from the disgraced Peter Mandelson, the electorate respond favourably to ... the spectacle of Labour attacking the interests of working class people. In this way, the stupid mistakes Starmer and Rachel Reeves made shortly after entering Downing Street - taking away winter fuel payments from "better off" pensioners, then threatening to cut support to disabled people - makes sense. They, or at least the dearly departed Morgan McSweeney, thought this would win plaudits with the press and therefore admiration among the punters. Imagine their confusion when this article of Blairist faith turned out not to be.

And the other? An inability to combat left wing critiques politically. Or, to be more accurate, offering convincing counter-arguments. The right won back control of Labour by lying its head off, and then using the bureaucracy to chase out the left. During the Corbyn years, it was the smears, the cry-bullying, and using remainerism as a proxy. None of them came up with an alternative programme that could persuade and convince. And the same is true today. Compromised by the government's support for a genocide, its scapegoating of the powerless, and a programme of weak and meek changes, Labour's biting back at Green Party criticisms would be a vain effort at gumming them to death. This is a consequence of the managerialist cadres Labour selects for its parliamentarians, typified by the man at the helm. These people are unaccustomed to hearing the word "no". But this comes on top of the Labourist tradition that, for over a century, had a political monopoly on the most organised and conscious sections of the working class. When its opponents to its left were the official Communist Party or the extra-Labour Trotskyist left, they could be ignored. When it was internal, as per Militant, they could be excluded. And on occasions when a left wing challenge pushed through, such as George Galloway's trio of election victories, or when Jeremy Corbyn and the so-called Gaza Independents won their seats, it could be put down to local circumstances. Labour has serious difficulties facing a mass left wing challenger party because it's never had to.

The result of all this is what we see today, peddling smears against the Greens that wouldn't be out of place in a Sun editorial or, for that matter, a Reform leaflet. If by some fluke Labour hold on to Gorton and Denton on Thursday, or if they somehow come ahead of the Greens, these points remain. Labour is unsuited and unprepared for a challenge from its left flank, and there's no sign, at least under this leadership and its heirs apparent, that it ever will be.

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